James Gurney

This weblog by Dinotopia creator James Gurney is for illustrators, plein-air painters, sketchers, comic artists, animators, art students, and writers. You'll find practical studio tips, insights into the making of the Dinotopia books, and first-hand reports from art schools and museums.

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All images and text are copyright 2015 James Gurney and/or their respective owners. Dinotopia is a registered trademark of James Gurney. For use of text or images in traditional print media or for any commercial licensing rights, please email me for permission.

However, you can quote images or text without asking permission on your educational or non-commercial blog, website, or Facebook page as long as you give me credit and provide a link back. Students and teachers can also quote images or text for their non-commercial school activity. It's also OK to do an artistic copy of my paintings as a study exercise without asking permission.

Friday, March 2, 2018

Some of the oldest cave paintings are in Spain, and they have been dated to 64,800 years ago, when the European subcontinent was inhabited exclusively by Neanderthals. This means that Neanderthals, and not just modern humans, were capable of the abstracted thought necessary for making meaningful marks.

Those marks are reconstructed above. To the right is a complicated shape with branching forms. In the upper left, rows of small dots curve above a ladder-like shape. Are the dots counting or recording some number? Does the ladder-like shape suggest structures, boundaries, enclosures, or categories? No one knows. What those marks might mean is impossible to say.

Animal outlines appear inside the rectangles, but it's possible they were painted after the the rest of the shapes.

8 comments:

I know this is silly but it looks to me like a map of a plot of land, some designated for crops (the dots), some for livestock with the heavy lines showing irrigation.

Honestly, the shape on the right side looks like a modern sprinkler assembly used to water plants. Either ancient aliens are responsible for this advanced technology or I'm completely wrong in my interpretation...

I'm lucky enough to live near some caves with paintings dated 20,000 years old. It's 20,000 years after the last of the Neanderthal's, but it's still fascinating to see these in person. There were at least 7 known types of homo species having lived on this planet. The Neanderthal's are seen like a primitive ancestor today, but we all carry their DNA; there is some evidence that they were more intelligent than modern humans, having larger brains, and they may not have been made extinct by modern humans as is the popular notion.

Could this be the beginnings of a new plot-line for a new sci-fi story? Neanderthals create a civilization where they use propeller-propelled sleds on the melting glaciers to protect their Mammoth-farms from the invading Homo-sapiens from the south? “Mire and Ice”?“Neandertopia”?I think we might be on to something here! Or maybe it’s not so Sci-fi after all. –RQ;p